The Royal Historical Society is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Lucy Noakes as its new President. Lucy began her Presidency at the Society’s Anniversary Meeting (AGM) held on Friday 22 November 2024.
Lucy is the 36th President of the Royal Historical Society since its formation in 1868. As President, Lucy will lead the Society’s work to advocate for the historical profession and to promote the value of historical knowledge and understanding, in higher education, related professional sectors and the wider community.
Lucy is Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a social and cultural historian of early to mid 20th-century Britain. Before joining the University of Essex in 2017, Lucy held academic posts at the universities of Southampton Solent, Portsmouth and Brighton.
As a specialist in the history of modern Britain, Lucy researches the experience and memory of those who have lived through conflict, with a particular focus on the First and Second World Wars. Her recent publications include the monographs Dying for the Nation. Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (2020) and War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity 1939-1991 (revised edition 2023), and the co-edited collection Total War: An Emotional History (2020).
Lucy’s forthcoming monograph, The People’s Victory. VE Day Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There, is published next May. Her work makes extensive use of the Mass Observation Archive, of which Lucy is a trustee.
On 22 November, Lucy began her term with the Society’s 2024 Presidential Lecture: ‘War and Peace. Mass Observation, Memory and the Ends of the Second World War in Britain’. Video and audio recordings of the lecture will be made available shortly.
The 2024 AGM also marked the appointment of four new members of the Society’s governing Council: Dr Cath Feely (University of Derby), Professor Karen Harvey (University of Birmingham), Professor Matthias Neumann (University of East Anglia) and Dr Jesús Sanjurjo (University of Strathclyde). We welcome all four to the Society’s board of trustees.
The Royal Historical Society is the UK’s foremost learned society for the support of history and historians. Founded in 1868, today’s Society is an international membership organisation of more than 6,500 historians working in higher education, archives, museums, publishing and broadcasting, as well as independent researchers and in community history groups.
The Society undertakes advocacy for the historical profession and promotion of the value of history; policy and research in areas relating to the discipline; a programme of public lectures and events; provision of research funding; and a programme of scholarly publishing, including its journal, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (founded in 1872).